


Ricktrix: Birdloaded

by AnathemaAuthoress



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Flashbacks, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Marking, Mindcrawling, Reversible!BirdPerson, Reversible!Rick, Urine Play, flight sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:40:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28138590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnathemaAuthoress/pseuds/AnathemaAuthoress
Summary: Rick is tired of waiting on Birdperson to come around, so he decides to jack into his friend’s brain Matrix-style. Yet what awaits Rick on the inside is a labyrinth of shared experiences, some he’d nearly forgotten, others he wished he had, and those he never wanted to.
Relationships: Birdperson | Phoenixperson/Rick Sanchez (Rick and Morty)
Kudos: 9





	Ricktrix: Birdloaded

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written as my second fic for the 2020 minibang! I missed the deadline and have decided to make it a chapter fic instead so I can keep working on it and develop it more as I'd originally intended. I think setting too tight of a deadline for this one is unwise if I want to pack in all the details this pairing deserves. So I hope you'll all be patient with me as I continue to flesh things out.
> 
> This chapter contains art by one of my minibang partners who has asked to remain anonymous. It's truly beautiful and I hope it brings out the moment for all of you like it did for me. More art to come in future chapters!
> 
> Thanks for reading!

Silence permeated Rick’s surroundings as if it had seeped into the cellular spaces. Everyone else was somewhere else, though where they’d gone he could only venture an educated guess, since he’d been sliding through the last few weeks in a subtle drunken slurry. 

He wasn’t entirely sure if anyone but Morty had noticed, but it didn’t matter. _Nothing did,_ but that concept was old hat, something Rick was tired of falling back on. A mantra which left him more hollow than free. 

“Gruba huga ho,” Rick said listlessly. It was BirdFolk that roughly translated to _running in circles._ Rick flung an arm over sore, exhausted eyes and tilted back a little further in his chair. The cheap plastic squealed under the strain and the sound was like a bird of prey preparing to swoop. 

His head was throbbing, by choice, like some bizarrely delayed self-harm. He knew he was sulking, of that Rick had no delusions, but he didn’t know for a fact that he wanted to stop. Working on something would be the more productive waste, but drinking until the hangover ebbed was easier.

“Ugh,” Rick grunted. He flung himself forward to the edge of his seat and bent at the hip and pulled out one vial of green liquid, which would cure his headache, and one of fizzy blue liquid which would get him blackout drunk through at least the weekend. 

He set them at equal distance on the table before him and leaned back in his chair, slouched down low, and weighed his options.

He wasn’t supposed to get the kind of drunk he could be lectured about. The kind that really took the edge off was, as it happened, also the kind that led to two am expeditions to solar stratoses with Morty against the boy’s will, and consent mattered in this circle of hell now. Rick had found a balance just isolating enough, a measured gallon or so of the mortal stuff that his iron liver could stomach that would set the world just sideways enough to tolerate. An acceptable wasted.

Of course, that only made him want to do it more, defy and be like old Rick, an unfeeling bastard that didn’t care who his drunken ramblings hurt. Of course, he didn’t care now. Much.

He bounced his long legs against the floor idly and again the chair squawked out that primal cry under pressure. Involuntarily, Rick’s eyes flitted to the panel on the wall beside him where his best friend’s remains were hung like some macabre hunting trophy, head and lingering limbs disassembled. Rick had done some minor repairs, but there was too much risk in building a body from the ground up when the brain of the beast was still barely more than that.

In his present state, PhoenixPerson— _Fuck’s sake_ , Rick still bitched each time he thought of the name, as if he would have come up with anything better—was pure rage. PP wanted to rind the flesh from Rick’s bones and then probably nest in the leftovers or some other gorey shit. 

Rick had known for a while that if he wanted to get the real man back he was going to have to take a risk he didn’t want to take, on a misadventure he didn’t want to go at alone. Sadly, it had been nearly three months since Rick’s friend had gone into storage and in that time there had been no signs of improvement. 

Rick groaned and turned back to the vials. “Fuck it, fine, whatever.” In a clean sweep he grabbed up the green one, knocked it back like a shot, and clenched his head as a wave of dizziness knocked out his headache.

When his sight cleared, he stood and started yanking things out of drawers and compartments.

A series of wires, microchips, and premade contraptions. He piled everything up haphazardly then wheeled his chair across the room to grab up tools and a small green and black cube from the depths of a shelved cardboard box. 

Rick was more careful with the cube. He cleared part of the workbench and sat it down in the open space. Without much consideration, he ran his fingers over it like it was a small, delicate animal. Then he set about the task of constructing the necessary masterpiece for his plan.

It probably only took a few hours, but Rick didn’t feel them. He got lost in the trance of turning screws and sparking wires. 

When he was done the table held the cube, bursting with red, green, and blue cords, twisting over and through, an almost anatomical tangle. Like veins, the wires pumped electricity into the heart of the cube as it drew commands from the switchboard Rick had built from scratch. From the vertical-standing metal sheet extended tendrils of steel and plastic. 

Rick moved one of these from a prong on the board to the extension of a microchip. He clipped it in place, then slid the chip into a gun. 

Once it was loaded, he retrieved the last piece he needed. 

With the click of a button he turned the wall to reveal the unconscious PhoenixPerson.

“Hey, Perse. You’re, uh, well you’re practically dead. So I guess you can call me Doctor Frankenstien, because I’m about to make an emotional decision that may lead to the deaths of innocent bystanders, haha!” Rick’s forced laughter petered out quickly without a proper audience.

He cleared his throat, ignored the itch in his fingers that wanted to reach for his flask, and disconnected his friend’s head from the wall. He snapped a life-support collar around the dismembered neck, put the head on the table, and woke the poor bastard up.

PhoenixPerson’s eyes shot open and his mouth widened in a shriek. Rick cringed against the sound, but quickly pressed the microchip gun to PP’s temple and fired.

The chip sliced its way inside with a sickening squelch, PhoenixPerson’s eyes dilated, and the sound died off.

Rick waited until the green cube started to hum, then he reloaded the gun and fired the second chip directly into his own head.

His vision blurred and his head throbbed, sound strung ripcord through his frontal lobe, the whistle of energy like fresh off a crash. 

Rick blinked against white and for an instant feared he’d miscalculated something, but soon the pain and noise ebbed to dull nothingness and he clammored to his feet.

The whiteness didn’t fade and, though it was stark, it wasn’t blinding, but rather hum-drum like the interior of a hospital. “Waiting room?” Rick asked no one in particular.

“Isolation chamber,” came a clear, familiar voice Rick hadn’t heard in a while.

He whipped around and found a stark metal door stretching along the white. Beside it, a small, blue, square intercom. From it emerged the voice again.

“Password.”

“Ah, the entry point. This like a firewall or, uh, BP brain protection?” Rick tilted his head, inspected the intercom as if it might suddenly change shape.

“Password is required to access beyond this point,” said the not-quite-Birdperson.

“Uh, fuck. Wubba Lubba Dub Dub?”

“Seriously?”

“Oh he’s got snark. How should I—how am I supposed know what arbitrary padlock you’ve snapped over your subconscious?” Rick placed both hands on his hips, as if awaiting an explanation. None came and so he let his mind wander.

Rick was fully dressed which meant he’d manifested on the mental plane as he’d been, so he probably had something in his pockets he could use to break down the door. But then again, it was only metaphorical and forcing his way inside carried some questionable moral implications. He wasn’t trying to break what was left of his friend’s psyche. 

“Password.” FirewallPerson was rather impatient.

“1111?”

A high-pitched wail broke through the surrounding quiet. Rick slapped his hands over his ears, but still coiled inward on instinct as if to avoid any agony that might follow.

When the bird screech subsided, FirewallPerson snapped, “If you aren’t going to take this seriously, you might as well leave!”

Rick stuck a pinky in his ear to hurry the rings into subsiding, but they were still there long after he gave up on that. He felt an itch in his pockets, a probing need to wreck through this arbitrary gate like the goddamn FBI on a bust. Even so, he held back a bit longer, determined to do this properly. Most of the danger here was by Rick’s own hand and he knew he’d sit in this white void forever if it meant not breaking something valuable.

“Fuck’s sake, I’m trying okay? Let’s—lemme see. If I were a basic ass bird bitch with a passcode-locked internal matrix, what asinine obsession would I merit worthy enough to—“ Rick trailed off mid-thought and buried his face in his hand. “Ugh. Tammy? Is the password Tammy?”

“Incorrect.”

“What?! How is that not it? That’s got to be it! Tammy! Tammy1! Tammyizhot! Tammyisatraitor! TammyfuckingTammy!”

“Incorrect,” the firewall growled.

Rick dug his fingers roughly into the meat of his cheeks and pulled until the red flesh of his internal eyelids bulged outward as he growled. Then he let go, took a deep breath, and tried something else.

What felt like hours later, he was reduced to sitting on the blank white floor, knees to chest, arms folded lazily across them, forehead cradled on his arms, as he stared into the void between his legs, guessing. “Fireworm?”

“Incorrect.”

“Egg?”

“Incorrect.”

“Rick Sanchez?” Rick asked huffily.

“Incorrect,” FirewallPerson replied mockingly.

“Figures.” Rick couldn’t believe how difficult this was. The last thing he’d ever given up on completely was his marriage and he sort of wanted to avoid round two of that, but this system wasn’t giving him much choice. He’d tried every basic word and number sequence of meaning he could think of, but he was starting to suspect it was just random numbers and letters. “Can you at least give me a hint?”

To Rick’s surprise, the intercom did not instantly reject him. “Answer the security question for a hint. What is mother’s maiden name?”

“Easy, BirdBeing.” 

“Correct. The hint is: Band.”

“Band?” Rick was puzzled. He’d already tried Flesh Curtains and AlmaSquawker, the band BP had been with before the Curtains. That group had only been together a few weeks, so Rick doubted the code was hidden there.

Rick ran his hands through his hair and tried to think. Back in the Curtain days he, Perse, and Squanchy—and for a short time an alternate timeline Bowie—had lived, played, and shagged in a ship Rick had built on a whim. A sort of space-friendly Winnebago that always smelled like cheap booze, tortilla chips, and sweat. Rick missed that ship and the memory of the scent made him woozy with nostalgia—a feeling he didn’t mess with too often.

“Dionysus,” Rick guessed. It was what they’d dubbed the ship one afternoon while plastered on fancy wine. Rick recalled asking how BP knew about _shitty Earth lore_ and BP had promptly replied that he didn’t. Then they’d flown to another nebula to hang out with the actual Dionysus, whom BirdPerson had known in highschool as a transfer student. 

The intercom surprised him again. “Incorrect. But warmer.”

“I guess I should have asked for a hint sooner,” Rick replied, half-annoyed, but smiling. He was pleased to be getting somewhere.

The group had gotten plenty of tail on the Dionysus, but when they weren’t fucking—groupies or each other—BirdPerson was usually playing around on that hunk of metal he called an intergalatic laptop.

“I told him I’d build him a better one, but he loved that stupid thing,” Rick mused aloud. He knew the intercom didn’t care what he meant. 

BirdPerson would look up porn and visit mating sites like any normal guy, but he also used it as a sort of library where he’d download and store thousands of songs from across the galaxies, and books. Books he’d tell Rick all about, books that would make his monotone fluctuate with passion. Learning things had always made BirdPerson sing, and Rick wished he’d paid more attention back then.

After an incident with Squanchy downloading a virus, Perse had started password locking the computer.

Remembering that almost made Rick scream, both in victory and in how it made him feel dense and oblivious.

“Fuckin’! I know it! I got it! Jesus—how do I—why did I not—? Fuck!”

“Password?” FirewallPerson asked drolly, Rick could almost see the lifted eyebrow. 

“FleshCurtainsrockoutloud!”

“Correct. Welcome to the hub.”

The inside wasn’t quite what he had anticipated. Past the door, the pristine white faded to a stormy gray and as far ahead as Rick could see was dappled with foggy gray-white clouds that sparked and rippled with thin bolts of lightning. 

The room was full of hazy whispers, a murmur of indistinct rabble rose up all around him and Rick was grateful he had experience filtering out white noise.

Every living creature had their own headspace or mind palace or whatever other pretentious garbage they saw fit to label it. Rick had been in and out of a few, but never belonging to anyone he liked.

He’d expected ones and zeros or a motherboard or even Perse’s home planet, but inside it was a darkened sky and yammering clouds. He didn’t know if this was the result of Phoenix, Bird, or some bizarre amalgamation. 

To make matters worse, he wasn’t completely sure what he was looking for. Rick hadn’t even been sure if there was anything left of Perse to save. While the intercom had asaged that fear somewhat, he didn’t really know how to go about deprogramming _clouds._

So all he really could do was walk deeper into the stormy sky and hope for the best. He realized quickly that as he drew nearer to certain clouds, he could hear their mutterings with more distinction.

_“Go on, jump, don’t be afraid…”_

_“For every action…”_

_“No I don’t understand…”_

Clips and phrases jumped out here and there, like the ripples of lightning passing through the clouds. Rick felt icy chills escape down his back. These were storage cells, BirdPerson’s life in compounded packages. Rick had no way of knowing how true they were, but they gave him a sense that he was invading a private sphere.

Then he saw it, a figure standing on the horizon. Familiar feathers silhouetted. It seemed to beckon with a wave. Without concern, Rick ran toward it.

Yet, when he got close, he realized he could see right through it. It was turned away from him, some smaller, leaner Perse, but see-through like a shimmering hologram. 

“Wait,” Rick called out to it, but felt instantly stupid.

It kept walking away from him, directly into a large, wavering cloud. 

Rick moved toward the cloud and groaned. “Feels, trappy,” he tsked. Even so, he knew he had little choice. He reached out slowly with one hand and screamed as he was roughly pulled in full-bodied by some unseen magnetic force.

First he was tumbling through the clouds, with only building rumbles of thunder and his own screams for background noise, then he was in a ship, broken steering in hand, and he was careening through space. He could see it clearly through the viewfinder as he spun out.

He tried to pull up, to engage emergency buttons, but his hands didn’t move. Rick’s body flailed of its own accord.

Then he hit the ground and everything went black.

When he came to, his vision was blurry. He could only make out the faintest shape, but Rick knew it well enough.

_Perse,_ he wanted to say as his vision slowly cleared, _I found you! We have to fix your head!_

However, despite his will, what came out of his mouth was, “Wh-who the hell are you?”

_What the hell?_ Rick thought with sudden, extreme panic. He couldn’t speak, he felt himself touching his head, he felt the ache in it, but the motions, the pain and reality, weren’t his.

“I am Rawwgarawww Keee,” BirdPerson said, his voice steady and demeanor calm, even as he threw back his head and screeched his native tongue. “In your dialect it is pronounced _BirdPerson._ ”

“I bet,” Rick, or Rick’s autopilot body, said. Then he tried to sit up, but a large, firm hand pressed him gently back onto the sofa where he was laid out.

“You shouldn’t move. You hit your head quite hard on the way down.” 

Rick’s vision was finally fully focused and he saw that BirdPerson looked too lean, too young and steely-gazed. Rick felt himself swoon a little at about the time his head cleared enough to remember that he’d already done this once before. 

“Listen pal, I’ve hit my head harder, trust me. Let me—“ Rick’s mouth tried to protest.

BirdPerson pressed a cool cloth to the stubborn man’s forehead and Rick fell silent.

He remembered this clearly. It was the day they’d met and in that moment, as it had the first time, the persistent, gentle touch made Rick dizzy with sentiment as well as uneasiness.

Back then the touch belonged to a stranger, a handsome man that looked fit to rip boulders in half, but instead was subtle as a lamb. An unfamiliar kindness that had been rare in Rick’s as-of-then limited travels. To the Rick on a ride-along, it was his best friend’s touch and he knew he didn’t deserve it with the same volume that he desperately wanted it anyway.

They were both about twenty then, or around thereabouts if one deducted time warps and trips through rifts. It was before Rick was married, back when he was just a rowdy genius ripping through space in search of meaning. The truth was, despite the lies he’d told to the Federation to get them out of his brain, Rick had actually been a dimension-hopping scientist long before he’d ever met his wife. If he thought about it, he doubted she would have fallen for him any other way. 

He’d lied with that little fantasy of his in a lot of ways. He was ashamed to admit it, but he’d seen a Diane and an innocent, dopey Rick off the edge of the Finite Curve once and had always wondered what that dude’s life had to be like. But, that world had never been his. His wife’s _name_ wasn’t even Diane.

However, as much as he’d ever pondered playing pretend, he wouldn’t have given this up. If it had taken him until his thirties or forties to make the portal gun, he might never have met BirdPerson to begin with.

On the flip of it though, feeling the newness of his body, sensing his own urge to flee, it felt too familiar. Too _not enough behind him._ It sickened Rick to think that he’d become the kind of cliche that spent their whole life trying to recreate their youth. Even though Rick promised himself he’d sworn off looking for meaning, there he was, gazing into what was essentially a moving photograph, feeling remorse and desire in equal fucking measure. 

He just had no idea what to do about it.


End file.
